Some people say it's foolish to worry about soulless creatures overtaking the earth and devouring our brains.
I say they've already won.

Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Overreach

If we can count on anything, it's for Republicans to overplay their hand. (see Benghazi, IRS scandal, Lewinsky, the shutdown, you name it).

The interesting thing is that the roll-out of the Obamacare website has been widely derided as a maiden voyage only moderately less sucky than the Titanic's.

But my guess is that this has been exaggerated.

First, I give you Booman, who notes that unlike Fox News, the "liberal media" has been reporting the shortcomings of the website. Ezra Klein notably called it a disaster. The result of this has been that a press that typical takes a "one side says A, the other says B, therefore the truth lies exactly between the two points" has been starved of that technique. If Ezra Klein and the President both say it's awful, my God, it must be even worse than that. Logging onto healthcare.gov must give you malware.

But TPM has actually tried to use the website and found it frustrating but hardly disastrous. In other words, not unlike quite a few human-internet interfaces that the average person has.

So, having stepped all over the website rollout with the shutdown, expect the GOP to now go overboard in condemning the website ("How dare the government make it harder for people to sign up for a plan we want to get rid of!").

And once again, their apocalyptic rhetoric will not match up with the average person's reality.